Game:

Battlantis (1987)

Duration: 19:31

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11

Battlantis is a game that is simultaneously refreshing and maddening in its simplicity and efficiency.

Hearkening back to the game that jump-started its genre, it features grids of enemies that shift back and forth across the screen à la Space Invaders. Also like Space Invaders, any of the enemies reaching the bottom of the screen and ascending the wall of your fortress dooms you to an untimely demise. To this formula Konami added a wide variety of stage designs that tests the player in all sorts of ways.

This stage design is both the highlight of the game and the bane of prospective winners. It often pushes the player character to the brink of his (admittedly very limited) capabilities, demanding a total comprehension of the stages and enemy behaviors to claw through, but the ways it does so are often clever, and every stage feels unique (even the second "loop" isn't so much a loop as it is a second half, since everything except the main bosses are new). Since failing to kill any of the enemies leads to your death, there is no shrinking away from the challenge, no hiding in the corner waiting for dangerous enemies to conveniently leave the arena.

I found this strictness off-putting at first, but grew to enjoy its starkness. Battlantis does not distract you from the heart of its gameplay with complicated systems or flashy superfluity. It knows what it wants from you and makes that clear from the get-go. It's just you, the enemies, and maybe a handful of projectiles. And the fortress walls that seem to exist more to protect the enemies from you than vice versa. Rather than overload the screen with chaos to create challenge, the game shows a strong restraint in efficiently exploiting your limited capabilities, placing enemies and attacks such that even a single projectile, or none at all, can strike fear in one's heart. Those limitations (slow movement speed, shot limit, etc.) paired with the enemy behaviors (and the RNG in some places) can feel like total BS as early as stage 2, but I also found that throughout playing this game I never questioned my ability to conquer the challenges. Even as I died over and over again, I felt like I could really pull through given another chance, so despite all the questionable aspects to this game I cannot bring myself to call it "unfair." And that's what kept me drawn to this game. Of course, however, that opinion doesn't take into account the second loop, which turns everything up to eleven and which I haven't even begun to think about clearing.

A side note: Despite how unforgiving the game is in many ways, recovering from a death is actually quite forgiving, since you don't lose any real power and enemies in the grid that you have already eliminated do not respawn. Timed enemy spawns and bosses, however, do reset. It's an interesting mix of both checkpointed and non-checkpointed gameplay. Also, if you double-KO, dying at the same time as a boss (or even before, if one of your remaining shots finishes off the boss), the game counts it in your favor, moving you on to the next stage without even subtracting a life.

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